Deanna Shimota (00:00:05) - Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight podcast. I'm Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded, and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up-and-coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new, innovative solutions available in the market. And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot, stay tuned for details at the end of the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of the HR Tech Spotlight. Today we are digging in to talk about MeBeBot, an AI digital employee experience platform that harnesses generative and authoritative AI to help organizations create stronger trust and engagement among employees by giving them accurate and compliant answers to their questions. By automating answers to frequently asked questions, employees get help and support 24 x seven within Slack, Teams and via web chat. Joining me to talk about MeBeBot is Beth White, founder and CEO of the company.
Deanna Shimota (00:01:19) - Welcome to the show, Beth.
Beth White (00:01:22) - Well, thanks so much for having me, I appreciate it.
Deanna Shimota (00:01:25) - Yeah, it's great to have you. So let's start off. Tell us about your background in the HR tech space.
Beth White (00:01:31) - Well, really. My background began in HR, so I kind of found myself as an accidental technology person within the space. I, like many people that started in HR, fell into HR. It wasn't my degree or major. In fact, I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Go Badgers! And, we are, you know, I was focusing on a pre-law really, professional path. And I found myself working in organizations that needed help with recruiting and developing talent. And next thing you know, I'm part of the HR team. So I spent many years working in a number of different companies, you know, from service and hospitality industries to retail to a lot of tech companies here in Austin, Texas. And, grew a career really having worked in every different type of role within HR.
Beth White (00:02:28) - But I actually left HR, which was kind of a pivotal moment because of the frustration that MeBeBot solves for and, went into another area of enterprise software sales in the retail tech community and learned a lot about things that we can bring into the HR tech world from learning about the business to consumer and can in customer experience side of things.
Deanna Shimota (00:02:53) - Very cool. So let's talk a bit about what MeBeBot actually does.
Beth White (00:02:58) - Absolutely. So kind of segueing from my background and getting into the retail tech space, what I learned is that in companies today, we often don't know enough about our people to really do well, to support them, to provide them communications, to engage with them, and really to develop them to be their best selves withinside the workplace and to really help drive making work more meaningful. And so when the beginnings of AI chatbot started to surface on business to consumer kind of websites, we all likely saw them at the errors of the bank having a chatbot pop up or your cell phone provider having a chatbot.
Beth White (00:03:42) - What we saw was the beginnings of how do we help support people, consumers in a different way, in a more automated fashion to, you know, allow them 24 over seven support. So what MeBeBot did is we kind of flipped the model. We said, what if we provide that same type of employee support with inside companies and give employees putting them at the center of the human design a quick, easy way in their full of work to access MeBeBot so that they can get all the different types of questions they have in order to make themselves successful at the company. Answered 24 over seven in a seamless way from an app and Slack Microsoft Teams. We have a web chat, and moving forward we're going to be launching an SMS text messaging interface as well. For those frontline workers that are out there, not in and behind a computer. So we automate employee support. We help do communications to target employees and give them what they need when they're looking for it. We ask employees for feedback, and then we share all this data and insights to the business in a dashboard so that they can have real-time analytics on the people with inside their organizations.
Beth White (00:04:55) - And the more you learn, the more you can respond, right.
Deanna Shimota (00:04:59) - So you mentioned that you were previously in HR. And so, you know, the frustrations firsthand that people in those roles have. Tell us the story about how you found MeBeBot and came up with the idea for it.
Beth White (00:05:14) - Absolutely when I was. Gosh, I date myself a little over 20 years ago. I was working for a large computer consulting firm, and we have people across the globe, 100,000 people across the globe, and I ran an employee benefits support center. What did that mean? It meant we took phone calls from employees. We fielded emails. We helped support employees in a different way. In more of that call center support fashion. And really the idea of support came to, well, what's a 2.0 version of employee support? Well, let's enable AI technology to help automate the opportunities to provide employees 24 by seven support, especially in our global and dynamic world we live in where we have teams working remote, hybrid and other countries, and there's just a need to have more of this centralized support, but also provide that automation.
Beth White (00:06:15) - Because my biggest frustration when I was in HR is I never had enough time in the day to get everything done that I wanted to do that could be more strategic for the business. And so by providing a solution that allows our customers a lot of HR people, IT people, even facilities and payroll folks, time to be able to focus on more strategic tasks that are that are helping move the business forward, yet know that their employees are going to be taken care of. It's essentially a win-win on both sides of the equation.
Deanna Shimota (00:06:50) - And what would you say? And I feel like you've kind of alluded to this already, but what's a big challenge or problem that you see facing HR departments today that MeBeBot can help with?
Beth White (00:07:01) - I think one of the biggest problems is everyone's looking to do more with less. And when I say everyone, it's every company. You know, we've seen a lot of reductions across various industries. Departments are getting scaled back, so there's not as many team members to support employees and the other types of work that has to be done.
Beth White (00:07:22) - So what we solve for is we can help free up some valuable time so that the business, meaning the folks in those roles, can focus on, again, compensation plans, DEI initiatives, wellness programs, even help IT teams focus on security and compliance needs that the organizations have. And so by just doing that aspect of taking that level of work off their plates, essentially we're able to again, open up opportunities to do more with less in individuals and have a digital assistant, essentially BSI, a nice sidekick or addition to the HR team. In fact, we have one of our our blog posts has MeBeBot as part of the org chart because that's really how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as augmenting the humans in the roles so that they can be doing the things that they frankly went to school for, that give them more value in what they're providing to the companies, as well as making their own lives more meaningful as well.
Deanna Shimota (00:08:28) - So I think in the HR tech space, you know, there's certainly a lot of options out there.
Deanna Shimota (00:08:33) - Right. And I know that there are other companies that are doing things that are probably very similar to what MeBeBot offers. What is your unique point of view in the market or differentiation compared to the competitors out there?
Beth White (00:08:46) - Yeah, absolutely. Well, we came to market over five years ago with a solution to be what we were calling a bot in a box. So I know you mentioned that you come from a marketing background as well. And one way that we used to describe MeBeBot is it's kind of like the era of the web. When the web first started and people started designing websites, writing HTML text and creating and crafting web pages, you know, on their own. Now, you would never likely do that to create a website. You would use WordPress, or you would use Wix to create a website. We provide companies with the ability to quickly launch an AI platform and chatbot to their employees. Where we cloud host a solution. We take care of the machine learning and the ongoing training of the solution so that the business can focus on what they do best.
Beth White (00:09:47) - And the other component that we have embraced in the last year and a half, that is definitely our core differentiator, is that we have a hybrid model to leveraging AI. So when people think about AI technologies, they often think about ChatGPT. You know, it's great at helping you craft and write, perhaps an employee job description or, you know, come up with a blog post, for example. But generative AI today, in its current state, you know, is what's being talked about. There are levels of what they call hallucinations, where it can hear or see a prompt and respond with information that may not be as accurate. And the reasoning for that is because a lot of the ways these large language models, leveraged and generative AI were created was ingesting publicly sourced information. Well, if you think about supporting employee needs inside a company, that information was never accessible to be ingested. And so generative AI and its current state is frankly not ready to deliver policy information in a secure, compliant way to employees that keep seeing the the business in a good, legally sound place.
Beth White (00:11:01) - And so what MeBeBot does is we allow companies to, you know, will ingest company documentation like company handbooks, benefit summary guides, it FAQs. We apply generative AI, but we also apply to different what they're calling in the market today. Small language models that are designed to be data models specifically trained for this specific business use case. And we continue to hone on this domain-specific data model so that we know that the information we're succinctly providing as a potential answer to an employee is really accurate. But then we still have the human in the loop to verify the information before the information is delivered to an employee. All that information can be set inside our platform, and it's essentially the concepts of what you're now hearing more about in the marketplace. It's AI with guardrails. So we're an easy to launch solution that provides enterprise compliance because we're leveraging this concept of generative AI plus verified AI with the guardrails so that companies can be assured employees are getting information that has not changed from the sense of what they want them to receive, in compliance with all their business processes.
Beth White (00:12:23) - I know that's a lot and a mouthful, but in the era of AI, it's just it's a huge distinction and it's a big area of opportunity because AI is not one size fits all, and we're all starting to see that as we get into the space of AI more and use it in our daily lives. There's great use cases for certain things. And then there's other opportunities and times where it doesn't quite work well. So we're leaning into where you have to have precision. You have to have compliance, especially when it comes down to employees knowing how things operate with inside their businesses.
Deanna Shimota (00:13:01) - Yeah, that makes total sense. And I think, you know, collectively as a whole, the air industry, you know, like there's a lot of people out there that don't have a lot of experience with AI yet, and their perception might be like, I buy this out of the box. It works for us. It's great. And, you know, those of us who have worked with I know that the quality of the data in.
Deanna Shimota (00:13:26) - Matches the quality of the data out. Right. And so there's a lot of. Things around using AI tools that organizations need to be aware of as they go into their to make sure that it truly works the way they need it to work for them.
Beth White (00:13:42) - And then we lean into that a lot. In fact, we launched a group called ethical AI. For HR, it's a LinkedIn group where we're keeping abreast to all the different changes out there, because not only is it how does this work and how do I understand what the AI is doing? How do we also keep abreast to all the growing changes in employment law? there has been the first ever class action lawsuit filed against Workday by the EEOC for biases in the way that they're handling the application and screening processes of of resumes, for example, or applications coming into their system. Individuals, you know, believe that there may have been biases. And so there's laws correct today, you know, in New York City where this class action lawsuit was filed to actually say that companies need to disclose, you know, how they're leveraging AI in the recruiting and sourcing and screening of candidates in the hiring process.
Beth White (00:14:45) - And if they fail to do it in accordance to the laws, there will be fines, you know, for those individual companies and just of course, ill will, because, you know, you want to be seen as an employer. That's a great place to work and has ethically, you know, ethical principles where technology is not being biased, you know, or, you know, in place of the company itself. Right?
Deanna Shimota (00:15:12) - Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to think about. And in today's world, it's hot.
Beth White (00:15:16) - Topic. I mean, it does get complex. And so, you know, I hate to go down such a technical path, but I think the more people understand about AI and how it works, the more that they're actually going to gain trust and being able to work with vendors and partners that really understand it potentially better than they may at the start, you know, gives them assurance that, that they're keeping an eye on everything that's happening out there because it is going to get complicated, especially in the world.
Beth White (00:15:50) - I mean, there's different laws happening in Germany and Switzerland and other countries that haven't even made its way to the US yet. And then we're a country that loves to have everything regulated on a state level. Right. And so that does keep, you know, people having to stay on top of this, but you don't want them to be scared of the technology in order to do so. Right. That's the biggest thing is that we believe that everyone can leverage AI for good, for the best intentions, which is helping to free up time, helping to provide employees that kind of support that they need. You know, providing a new digital entryway into the organization that supports the changing dynamics of the workplace.
Deanna Shimota (00:16:35) - Yeah. And I think, you know, like, you hear all these things and I can see where organizations might be a little hesitant to jump right into AI. But I think one of the things that's important to like, remember, is if you find the right partners out there, like MeBeBot, who are paying attention to this stuff and really trying to stay on top of it and do what's right for their clients.
Deanna Shimota (00:16:59) - You're going to be in good shape because you know. Anybody can offer an AI solution. Not everybody is mindful about all of the things surrounding it and how to make sure that clients are protected.
Beth White (00:17:13) - Yeah, absolutely. I think that's where it comes from, is having the expertise on our team of people who have been in the role of HR. We come with an approach of understanding the world, the questions, the concerns, the fears. And we again, have built a solution that we believe, you know, is not just a great product today, but takes into consideration the changing landscapes in the dynamics of how I will start to play out across businesses as they, you know, frankly, will be embracing it and everybody is going about it at their own pace and path. and that's why, frankly, we have a hybrid model. Meaning if companies are not at that point where generative AI itself is accepted as a technology solution inside their company, however, they may be comfortable with natural language processing and machine learning, which is the basis of my bot.
Beth White (00:18:13) - We've been doing that for years before generative AI came along, and that's very similar to the kinds of technologies that have been out there that most consumers have embraced with using your Siri or Alexa or Google Home devices.
Deanna Shimota (00:18:30) - What type of companies are the perfect fit for me? Bot solution.
Beth White (00:18:35) - Yeah, absolutely. That's a good question because truly we can work with any company of any type. But the companies that really find and see our product as a huge value to their organizations, our companies that are are really at probably a couple hundred employees and grow and, and beyond where they've reached that tipping point, they know that they may not have enough people on their team to support all the needs of their employees in the high quality way that they want their employees to be supported. They're great candidates for MeBeBot, because we come in and we provide them, you know, a platform to, to use and grow upon. I mean, we do have customers in the tens of thousands of employees, but we're also happy to help companies that want to put in a great foundation and get started on a path to leveraging AI and thinking through operational efficiencies, different from day one, as the company is growing, larger companies have challenges because to your point, there are different ways you can solve, you know, the employee support needs.
Beth White (00:19:42) - And if companies have been using manual ticketing systems or other solutions provided by those larger vendors, they may be incredibly costly or they're so difficult to manage and maintain that the business users that know about information when it's changing don't have the ability to interact with those types of systems because they're frankly too technical and, and are preventing them from being more responsive, being more real-time. We came with an approach of, we really want the business users to embrace MeBeBot, and we make it a very easy, comfortable, you know what? We have an AI platform that's web-based that they interact with, that does not require technical expertise, but gives people an opportunity to learn about AI and use AI in a way that upskill themselves while they're learning and providing new solutions to their employees.
Deanna Shimota (00:20:40) - And what type of impact have you seen organizations that are working with me be that experience?
Beth White (00:20:46) - Yeah. So the impacts that they see, you know, I can give you a couple case study examples. one of which is E2 Open.
Beth White (00:20:53) - They were one of our initial customers and MeBeBot over three or actually five years ago. And at that point in time, they were going through exponential growth. They had been brought back private by a PE firm, and they were tasked to acquire other companies. So they went through 14 acquisitions in three years. And if anybody is out there in the world of HR, that's a really hard task because you don't get to add more people to your HR team just because you're, you know, adding new companies. And every time you do an acquisition, that's a whole group of new hires that have to be acclimated to the new company. So they had MeBeBot in as a foundational level, foundational support so that in those orientations to those newly acquired employees, they could say, hey, we know you all have lots of new questions about your paycheck and your benefits and how you do this. Within our company, we provided you MeBeBot to give you that support. And it went over so great with the newly, you know, joined employees to E2 open because they knew the company spent time thinking about them, the hurdles and obstacles they had to overcome as people being part of an acquisition.
Beth White (00:22:09) - But it also freed up the individuals within the IT and the HR teams and payroll that were scrambling, frankly, to get all these new employees into systems and set up to be successful. another use case example of MeBeBot is, you know, with a company that we work with called IGT and they have 10,000 employees, yet they're dispersed across the globe in over 30 countries. So they did have a great centralized, you know, global employee support team. However, everything was very manual, meaning employees would have to submit a ticket or a case. And at times they, you know, had to wait a couple hours to a couple of days to get a response back. And they really wanted more. They wanted to provide employees better support. They wanted to be able to accommodate all the different time zones that they were on. And so MeBeBot has become their front end that not only greets new hires, so they use our push messaging functionality to send out a greeting to the new employees that just joined IGT, letting those employees know if you have quick, you know, questions or need support, you know, ask me about any time it's here to help you.
Beth White (00:23:25) - We also have the ability to have the employee escalate to their live chat or to their ticketing queue. If it is an issue that does require more of the human people interaction. we know we solve for about 80% of the most commonly asked questions, but again, there is a reason for the people in the process and employee support, because there are more complex things that go on that people do need a higher level, what they call tier 2 or 3 level support. On issues like helping me research an insurance claim challenge I'm having or, you know, helping navigate a potential leave of absence, for example.
Deanna Shimota (00:24:10) - What is your future vision for the company?
Beth White (00:24:14) - That's always a hard one in the world of AI, because there's so much we could do and there's so much potential. But really, where we've embraced is helping support the employee experience. But being that AI platform to support digital workplace transformation. And I know that's ambiguous in a lot, but what does that mean? And for years people have been talking about the future of work.
Beth White (00:24:40) - What is the future of work and workplaces look like? And MeBeBot is that digital assistant that is there to help guide an employee through support. However, we can do a lot more to really personalize the experience for an employee. Like for example, being able to give them very directive answers to their questions specific to them as a person, use MeBeBot to predict, you know, perhaps trends that are happening within a size of business based on the usage data that we have within our system. I think one of the interesting case studies that everyone's wanting to solve is, why are we dealing with what they call autopsy data, which is data that's typically generated in your human capital management systems, like what's the turnover report? You know, how many people you know are in this type of role on that given date a month ago? Well, people need that information in more real-time, but they really just don't want the turnover report. They want to know what's happening, what's causing attrition, how do we actually help prevent people from leaving a company? What are some of the warning signs that we could use AI to actually predict potential resignations, and how do we counterbalance that? So those are some interesting opportunities that will lend itself well to the AI path that MeBeBot is on, as well as doing more to help coach and develop employees as they grow and their path to being part of organizations longer.
Beth White (00:26:14) - A lot of it is developing employees and could MeBeBot be part of that scenario where we, you know, our coaching, we help serve up micro trainings, we help make employees understand the different opportunities that are available for them with inside their own company, so that perhaps they don't leave that organization to get their dreams and goals fulfilled.
Deanna Shimota (00:26:38) - We've covered a lot today, and I know when it comes to AI, we could probably have a six hour conversation, right?
Beth White (00:26:45) - For Sure.
Deanna Shimota (00:26:46) - What final thoughts, Beth, do you want to leave our listeners with?
Beth White (00:26:51) - I think it's just, you know, if you've got any kind of concerns and fear, talk to vendors, talk to people like maybe we're here to not only, you know, provide a solution for companies, but we do a lot of education. You know, we love to educate people. The more you know, the more you can get comfortable with these types of solutions that are out there. Because this technology, frankly, is probably not going away.
Beth White (00:27:16) - And so it's a great opportunity to to start embracing it and get to use it in a way that is safe and, and has it provided with, you know, compliance and guardrails that can fit your business and ideally, your own personal goals to grow with inside companies and use your super skills in different ways.
Deanna Shimota (00:27:39) - Where can our listeners go to learn more about MeBeBot?
Beth White (00:27:43) - We have a couple different places. We have our website of course. MeBeBot.com. And also please follow us on LinkedIn. We produce a lot of great content again in that education. By following our page, we also have a newsletter that you can sign up for from our our MeBeBot page as well. And then feel free to join our Ethical AI group for HR. that's another opportunity to get into a community, to really start to embrace the potential and power of AI, but also be comfortable with it in the sense of where it's headed as far as the legal ease is concerned.
Deanna Shimota (00:28:30) - All right. I will be sure to put links to the things that Beth mentions in the show notes.
Deanna Shimota (00:28:35) - Beth, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.
Beth White (00:28:39) - Oh, thanks for having me and appreciate your time today.
Deanna Shimota (00:28:43) - Yeah. You too. Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight podcast, where we showcase some of the best up-and-coming air technology options in the market. If you are an air tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program, please contact me via GrowthModeMarketing.Com or reach out to me Deanna Shimota on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative, subscribe. Connect with us on social media and leave a review. This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.